Sunday, October 01, 2006

Working at Oracle India Ptv. Ltd..

This is kind of a follow up to Elitecore and me post which I made couple of weeks back. I am thinking of doing this as a series on sharing the experiences I had with the various organizations I worked with. This is the second one and all these posts are NOT in the chorological order.

Why I joined Oracle India Pvt Ltd?I joined Oracle India Pvt Ltd in Dec,2003 and worked there till Jan,2005. I was part of internal IT team over there. So after spending close to one year in small startups, this was the first time I started working for a big corporate. And working with big software companies is some thing all of us in software field dream of. There is always this curiosity to know how big this companies are, what is the culture out there, the systems they use, the processes they have, the methodologies they follow for there product developments, how does their sales work, how do they support their products, the benefits they have for their employees, the campus and at last but not the least, the people they have. My reason for joining Oracle India was to gain some insights on how a big corporate works and to be part of their culture, the team, and to groom both my technical and soft skills.

My Experience at Oracle IndiaFirst and foremost thing, which I gained at Oracle India, was to develop strong interest in Data Warehouse and BI technologies from Oracle. After a comprehensive boot camp for one month, I was put into Business Intelligence team of Apps IT. Apps IT is the group within Oracle which looks after internal implementations of Oracle tools and Applications which it uses to support its one business functions. BI team was supporting wide range of BI and data warehousing applications, which were used by the global user community. I was mainly part of Analyzer implementation (both OFA and OSA). Working at Oracle was an enriching experience. There were great bunch of people around you, ranging from the ones with strong technical skills, to the ones who are sage advisors to the ones who are extremely good project managers to the full time party animals.

Learnings at Oracle India

There were strong technical learnings. On job, I learned Oracle Express and Analyzer product families. I developed strong fundamentals of this tools and how to best use these products for a particular business needs. Being part of BI team, I also got to learn other products like Discoverer, Oracle Warehouse Builder and EPB (Enterprise Planning and Budgeting, a next generation product which would replace OFA). I had significant exposure to Oracle database, PL/SQL, SQL and SQL tuning. Best place to learn any Oracle tools and Applications is Oracle itself. And that’s what I realized when I joined Oracle. It’s not just the resources like documents, webinars, product demos etc. to which you have access to, but the best part is the people around you who are always there to help you. Apart from BI tools and Oracle database, I had a significant exposure to Oracle eBusiness suite. Thanks to the boot camp, which covered things like Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports and AOL (foundation technology of Oracle Applications.)

Above to the technical skills there were loads of learnings at soft skill front. Over the period, I gained great amount of confidence both in the written and verbal communication. Honing my interpersonal skills was one more advantage of working with Oracle. Apart from this,

Why I left Oracle IndiaAfter saying all the above and ushering lot of praises about Oracle, its very difficult to justify why I left Oracle. And that too, just after 14 months! My work at Oracle involved both supporting the existing application and enhancing them and also rolling out new applications. Though rolling out new applications was 25% of what I was doing, but that was what I enjoyed most. Most of my work involved supporting and enhancing the existing implementations. However, I was looking for an opportunity where I was part of end-to-end implementation of some BI or data warehouse solution from scratch. That’s something I was not seeing in the horizon over there. Also the work at Oracle was not that intense. It was too chill-pill. I was looking for more challenging, more customer facing, more intense profile, a bit more pressure and a bit more ownership. All this culminated into leaving Oracle India and joining Ness Technologies at Singapore. More on my experience at Ness Technologies some time latter.

I am writing this post almost two years after leaving Oracle India. All what I have said here could have been influenced by the time I have spent in Singapore and at Ness Technologies. However I have tried my best to put the thoughts as accurate as what they were at the point of time when I joined Oracle and left it.

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